$10 Emergency Hostess Gift!!

There's still a couple of weeks left in the holiday season and I'm going to milk everything out of it that I can.

I wish it were Christmas every month.  There's no shortage of post ideas, that's for sure.  You know those stores where it's Christmas all year round?  They're usually ingeniously named "The Christmas Store"?  I should become The Christmas Blog.  All Christmas, all the time.

Of course if that were the case, you'd never learn things like how to toilet train your cat or how to help heal a gaping hole in the side of a goldfish.   And that's the sort of information everyone needs access to.  And by everyone, I mean 3, maybe 4 people tops.

I'll have to give it some thought.

In the meantime, let's continue on with today's post.  My sister had a party last weekend and everyone had to bring a "Gimme Gift".  It's so you can take part in a Christmas party game where every guest puts a $10 present under the tree. Then everyone picks a gift.  Then for some reason, everyone is allowed to run screaming across the room to tackle another party goer for whatever gift is in their hands.  This goes on until someone sustains a brain injury.

I hate the Gimme Gift Game.  Nonetheless, not wanting to be a spoil sport, I bought my $10 gimme gift.  Once I had made it, it occurred to me that what I'd really made was a nice little hostess gift for $10.  I'm proud to say it created quite a lot of mayhem during the Gimme gift exchange, and more than a few injuries.

Of course, it all began at the Dollar Store.  (when giving ANYTHING from the Dollar Store remove every possible thing that identifies it as being from the Dollar Store ... tags, stickers, smell of urine)

In this little gift basket are 3 wooden spoons (3 for $1.25), a bowl ($1.25), 2 mason jars, one filled with salt, the other pepper ($1 each, plus cost of salt and pepper), 2 small spoons ($1 each), 2 teatowels plus a dishcloth ($2 for all), some chocolates and a few of my farm fresh eggs.  You'll probably have to forego the eggs unless you happen to have chickens.  I can put the eggs in there, because I haven't washed my eggs of their outer membrane so they're fine out of the fridge for hours on end.  Total cost?  $10 once you factor in the cost of the salt and pepper.

Looking at it now of course, there are a ton of things I would have improved.  I would have filled the bowl with bits of straw, I would have tied twine around the mason jars and I probably wouldn't have included the eggs in the gift basket, which don't take kindly to being thrown across the room by an elderly Portugese woman in the hopes of not being tackled for her present.

I just tied the entire thing up with the dishtowels and secured it with some twine and added a couple of pine cones because I happen to be abnormally obsessed with pine cones these past few years.

And there you have it.  The $10 hostess gift post.  It won't save a fish but it might cause a riot.